Smartphones are affecting every facet of the shopping experience, from getting people in the door, to helping them compare prices, and how they interact with other shoppers and their social network throughout the sale. Mobile shopping is breaking down the walls of traditional brick-and-mortar stores by giving shoppers the ability to easily find a cheaper price in a store down the street. Smart phone applications, such as Google Shopper, RedLaser and TheFind, allow shoppers to look up a product by scanning it or typing in the bar code.
However, bar codes are mostly used with manufactured goods or items that are packed and shelved for customers. Bar codes are useful with produce, agricultural goods, bulk goods, or similar items but cannot fully encode an item plus a weight since the weight of a bulk item is variable depending on a quantity purchased at the time of sale. Items that are loosely available are subject to being purchased in different quantities (weight or volume), making it difficult to pre-code them. For example, different shoppers may have desire different quantities of vegetables, making it difficult to encode the weight into a barcode or other machine readable code. Shoppers often weigh the picked loose items at an in-store scale to determine its price based on weight.
Thus, there exists a requirement for a system and method for a solution enabling the shopper to identify the item on their phone and then read the scale weight via a digital UPC/QR code of the weight.